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>in use? Do any of these have Irish (or failing that UK, failing that
>European) offices or distributors? Etc.
 
LaserScan is (was, I haven't followed it for years) a Brit company with
a lot of commericial activity.
 
We have a Calcomp scanner which is OEMed from an American company VIDAR,
which I think is OEM for many scanning companies.  The scanning software
that came with it operates under windows, works OK but is a bit unnatural
to use.  It's stated resolution is 1200 dpi, but I was told that this
is interoplated, real resolution is around 400-600 dpi. It is a greyscale
scanner.  Color ones are damned expensive.  The vectorizing software
I think is the key. We have CadCore which is primarily CAD software,
so you pay for a lot of junk that you rarely if ever need.  I believe
CadCore is the guts of ArcScan in Arc/Info.  In any case, raw CadCore is
also very! un-natural to use! Its from Hitachi, if that gives you any hint.
 
File size is important to consider, a 250-dpi color TIFF will get as big
as 10-20 mb for one A3 or A1 image.
 
 
 
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Paul Hastings                                 [log in to unmask]
Director                               Environmental Information Center
                                       Thailand Environmental Institute